Wiscon is this weekend! I'll be there from Friday until sometime Monday. I'm not going to the Sign-Out, but if someone has something they want me to sign, just stop me in the hallway or find me after a panel or something.

We will discuss such works as The Chronicles of Narnia, Left Behind, Battlefield Earth and other stories that have a clear religious bias. Is it possible to be religious and write SF without pushing an agenda? Who gets it right? Who doesn't?

***This panel proposal came out of a conversation I had with LaShawn about the Chronicles of Narnia after watching the "Prince Caspian" movie and re-reading the book. I should note that I haven't read "Battlefield Earth" but I HAVE read "Left Behind" (in fact, I read it as preparation for a different Wiscon panel, years ago).

Do you baffle the mundanes with your fascination with wheelchair design? Can you geek out over assistive communication apps for the iPad, tactile maps, universal design, all-terrain wheels, hand-crafted wooden canes, specialized prosthetics? Technology is fascinating, and assistive technology is especially so. Let's talk about Hack Ability (Liz Henry's blog), the politics of having so much assistive technology under patent, and about cool stuff and how cool it is.

Real drugs, imaginary drugs, and magical addictions to other people's dreams—how are addictions handled in science fiction and fantasy? Can imaginary addictions be treated with real-world methods? How about fictional worlds in which addiction is not seen as a problem? Or in which addiction has become adaptive (are vampires addicted to blood?)? Possible works to consider: Stacia Kane's Downside series (beginning with Unholy Ghosts) in which Chess Putnam is addicted to a magical drug, Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah's Sime~Gen series in which Simes can become addicted to killing Gens, Yarrow by Charles De Lint for feeding on dreams.

***I volunteered for this one but am now feeling woefully underprepared as I haven't read the works mentioned at the end.

Let's talk about how we talk about sex with kids -- our own or other people's. Sex ed has become increasingly politicized and all too often schools wind up catering to their most conservative demographic. How do we frame these debates and argue forcefully that everyone's children deserve accurate sex ed? On a more informal level, how, when, and in what level of detail? There are a million books out there for parents about how to talk about sex with their kids, and a million more designed to give to your kids instead of actually talking to them. Are there any that are feminist, explicit enough to include the clitoris in their diagrams, frank about contraception, and sex-positive (...but maybe not TOO positive)?